Adrienne Davis knows what it means to be mentored. At Yale University, she studied under author/scholar/activist bell hooks, Cornell West came to her senior club to talk about black liberation theology, and she heard Toni Morrison read from “a draft of something called Beloved.” At Yale Law School, she became a protégé of Derrick Bell, Harvard’s first tenured African-American professor. Intellectual work might look solitary, but it needs a collaborative, supportive framework to thrive. That’s exactly what Davis, as executive director, wants Washington University’s new Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Equity to provide—for all of St. Louis.

Why now? Wash. U. has had a longstanding small cohort of faculty doing some of the most influential work in the world on race and ethnicity, and for the last five or six years, we’ve really been on a run hiring new faculty across all the disciplines. Some are humanists. Some are in public health, looking under a microscope at health disparities, or education. We have a brand-spanking-new sociology department, and its central focus is on inequality. The Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts has been recruiting people who look at the built environment and segregation as well as sustainable urbanism.

Was there a top-down mandate to hire scholars focused on equity? No. There was a diversity mandate, but that was separate from hiring all these folks, some of whom are not minorities. It’s just that a lot of people are especially interested in the research opportunities that are raised by St. Louis. We sit squarely in the heartland, squarely in the Midwest, and squarely in St. Louis, Missouri, which has been essentially the heartbeat of the nation’s racial conscience for the last century and a half: The Missouri Compromise. Dred Scott. Shelley v. Kraemer. Ferguson. These scholars are trying to actively interrupt and disrupt the racial and ethnic disparities that were baked in by segregation. I’m eager to see what new research methodologies and insights come out of this center. What would it look like if Wash. U. could begin to set the terms of the scholarly dialogue and policy-making about race and disparities in the urban core?

This isn’t just an academic project, either, I gather. We’d like to invite local institutions and community groups to request our assistance, maybe commission a white paper on some issue they’re involved with. Maybe a health clinic is noticing much higher rates of maternal morbidity among African-American women, and colleagues in the Brown School [of Social Work] can help develop a set of best practices the clinic could then implement and test. I also like the idea of labs. We have to be careful with that term, because historically, communities of color experience labs as they are the mice—they are the people whose blood is being drawn, and they never get any benefit from it—but I mean “labs” in terms of partnering with community organizations and exploring ways they can build capacity.

Does it work better to suppress bigotry under a civilized veneer or let it bubble into sight? That depends on what comes next. If the last several years have been a surfacing of longstanding problems that many people weren’t aware of, and we begin to tackle these problems, then I would say it was a good thing. Ferguson is a great example. Municipal court suppression was going on for years, and it was clandestine. Now we have reform; I’d say that was good. But if what’s happening now becomes the new normal, then we will have to come to terms with the fact that we are in a period of extreme racial retrenchment that is not unlike post-Reconstruction, which was about dismantling all the gains and going backward.

One thing’s certain: We’re definitely not post-racial. We had a speaker on campus a few weeks ago who said that this is the best time to be a person of color in the U.S. I thought, “No, I think it probably might have been better to be Hispanic five years ago than it would be today, when you’re being racially profiled and put in cages at the southwest border.” And the policing is arguably worse for African Americans now. We can’t just become complacent and assume that as time marches on, racism just goes away. We can’t subscribe to the progress narrative, in which history is inevitably becoming better. The moral arc of the universe only bends toward justice because we lean on it.

How do we lean harder, then? So much of it is about policies: How do we fix the problem of race and policing? How do we both diagnose the social determinants of health and then reduce disparities? How do we reform urban education in partnership with communities of color and not imposing it on communities of color? And at the same time, how do we understand this as one of the richest moments of racial cultural production in the U.S.? Just look at the Oscars. You had people of color and foreign, especially Mexican—movies and directors and screenwriters and actors—and yet within that, Spike Lee was really angry that Green Book won. We need my humanistic colleagues and my colleagues of pop culture to help us understand that. To help us understand the profound longing for black utopias like Black Panther at the same time that we are interrogating the black dystopias we see in film and popular culture.

What’s your take on language—why it matters and why people resist it so much? It’s hard for us to even conceive or imagine worlds outside language. Language opens up our possibilities, expands our imaginary frontiers. John Baugh, on our faculty, is one of the preeminent scholars of Ebonics. Ebonics is a made-up word. Did we really need it? Wasn’t it enough to just talk about the way black people talk? Well, no, because all the discussion about the way black people talk was pejorative and demeaning. So the point of labeling it wasn’t to just invent something but to actually give us a framework for understanding the underlying culture and meaning-making that was happening in black culture. We needed a new word to capture that. Gender nonconformity—that didn’t exist when I was coming up, and I’m a feminist theorist! Now, with the rise of that set of terms, I can see people who literally were invisible to me before. I like the new honorific Mx. Do you remember when Ms. came into being? That linguistic turn, when it was finally accepted, was transformative for us. I went from having to announce my marital status every time I talked to someone to having it be private, the way it is for men.

You did a series of exit interviews with faculty members who were people of color. What did you learn about the university’s culture? That there is isolation—personal, professional, and research isolation. There is not having mentors, being unmentored. There is an extraordinarily, exponentially heavy burden of service. There is systematic undervaluing of the research and scholarship. Then there were people who said it was great! But if there was one clear theme from all of those exit interviews, it’s that people were yearning for an intellectual infrastructure to support their research and professional development. That’s what we hope this center will be.

What made you care about these issues? I’m a product of my time. I was born in ’65, and in many ways that may have been the moment of peak racial optimism in the country. It was an era of King and Malcolm X and Pauli Murray and Gandhi and Ché Guevara. Thinking people at that point had all condemned segregation. The more liberal people thought racial justice was possible, and the more radical people thought racial liberation was possible. The poignancy of the last 50 years, which is basically my lifetime, has been this mounting fear that racial supremacy is hard-baked into America.

What was it like for you as a kid? My mother was kind of a housewife activist. In fifth or sixth grade, my community was bused. It wasn’t imposed; it was sought out. I remember this multiracial coalition of housewives who made it happen—they were meeting at our house, all the kids crawling around. When we bought our house in Silver Spring, Maryland, we were the first black family on the block, and white neighbors came to us and said, “We really need you to buy here. We don’t want to be all white anymore.” That doesn’t happen anymore.

You were named vice provost and put in charge of diversity eight years ago. What’s changed since? We have increased our African-American faculty by 113 percent and our overall underrepresented faculty by over 90 percent. About one-third of these hires are tenured full professors, so the transformative effects were felt immediately and deeply. These folks are rock stars in their fields, and they came to the university ready to assume meaningful leadership roles.

What are some of the bogus excuses people give for lack of diversity? Oh, the top one in St. Louis is, we say people of color don’t want to move to St. Louis. The opposite is true. A lot of my colleagues do work on race and ethnicity, and this is the place to do it. We are representative of the problems affecting the country and arguably the world—take us and Rio de Janeiro and Beijing or something, and you pretty much have it—so my colleagues are drawn by the scholarly possibilities. And for a lot of us, we want to be able to live lives of meaning and passion in an urban environment that’s affordable.

What causes bigotry? If I asked you to make a pie chart of the various causes… Could I do a Venn diagram instead? I think there’s massive overlap between learned bias and privilege and insecurity. What we are seeing is the radical decline of economic possibility for white men, which has been well, well documented since the 1970s. I don’t believe in demonizing working-class white men. They are victims of this system alongside the rest of us. One of the big successes of racism, of historical racial supremacy, was to pit white working-class people against people of color. That was the great success of slavery. When the communists came in and tried to organize across the Black Belt and get working-class rural whites and blacks to see their common interests, they were driven out of town. But they had this profound insight that it’s all about the economics. We have to fix the economics to be able to fix the racism.

What are we going to do about the stereotypical angry white male, meanwhile? I think in any society, you are always going to have hate, and in a democratic society, you are always going to have to tolerate hate. What I hope for is that we move hateful people to being the outliers and not the center. If you have cultural norms that value people and respect people and you have a couple peripheral people on the side who are hateful, they’ll have marginal power. You can never give up, though, because they can retake the power at any time.

So the 2020 elections will matter? I’m really hopeful that the center will be up and running in time to be putting out some top-notch analysis. It’s a heavy lift, but if we don’t do that, we are at a point where what’s going on may become the new normal.